DAVY: SCRAPBOOK A REMINDER THAT PAGES ARE TURNING

Nearing her mid-80s and having a sense that it’s time to care of certain arrangements, she asked a couple of my siblings to photograph all the items she thought one of her children or their children might someday wish to have (I think all this assumes the usual nod in the right of approval by my father).

The photographs have been assembled into three scrapbooks, and the pages often include my mother’s description of the provenance of the item.

This scrapbooks will be used to help her decide who might like to have what of her possessions. (Having witnessed some of the destruction caused by long knives appearing to carve up treasures upon the passing of the possessor, I think this may be one of the kindest acts of a mother toward her family.)

There isn’t anything among the items that is likely to cause one of those jaw-dropping moments on “Antiques Roadshow,” you know, the kind of thing where the antiques expert mumbles, “At auction, ahem, I believe one might possibly expect, ahem, to see prices in the $25,000 to $40,000 range …” and we in the television audience see the knees buckle on the person who brought the thing.

No undiscovered Dutch masterwork. No Tiffany lampshade. No letter from Abraham Lincoln to an ancestor (the closest thing to these rarities would be a tablecloth trimmed with Battenberg lace woven by my great-great-grandmother Asenath, which is on its way to a museum in Iowa).

Instead they are modest treasures, but extraordinary nonetheless.

For instance, there is a page for my mother’s silverware — silver-plated pieces that she purchased before she married my father with what was left from her $75-a-month paycheck as a school secretary. Each piece has a delicate rose stamped on it, and after they are used, washed by hand and dried, they are slid back into felt rolls.

Another picture shows an old pocket watch inside a bell jar. That timepiece once belonged to my great-grandfather, Jesse, the man for whom my son is named.

My father says his grandfather could chin himself while merely pinching two barn rafters between his fingers — no curling the fingers over the top of the boards. He was a powerful man with a big mustache who homesteaded his land.

One page has the straight razor, brush and razor strop my mother’s dad used every morning — the steel box containing these wonders also has a whetstone, his pocket knife and two pipes with stems chewed. The strop hung beside the farmhouse’s washroom sink and the mirrored wall cabinet. There Grandpa would stand, hair combed back and doused with Wildroot or some such hair tonic, his farmer’s tan line creasing his brow.

That strop represented a little law and order in his house, too. I don’t recall anyone being struck with it — we called it “spanked” — and while such corporal punishment may be far outside the acceptable range for most folks nowadays, its threat, even if unused, was a powerful deterrent to misbehavior.